Movie review: Towelhead -- 4 out of 5 stars

Roger MooreOrlando Sentinel Movie Critic

With its mixed messages, dueling "big themes" and conflicted characters, Towelhead, Alan Ball's film of Alicia Erian's novel, can seem as bewildering as adolescence itself. Racing hormones and raging racism, bad parenting by adults and worse decision making by the kids, all set against the first Gulf War -- it's almost too much for one movie to absorb and give shape to.

But it is still the most deeply disturbing, downright discomfiting movie about teen sexuality since thirteen.

Summer Bashil plays Jasira, the center of the story, with a beguiling innocence that gives way to Lolita-empowered allure. Jasira is 13, a Lebanese-American as uncomfortable with her place in the world as she is her newly discovered sexuality.

Given her first bikini "shave" by mom's too-helpful boyfriend, she is packed off to live with her NASA engineer dad in Houston. But both Mom ( Maria Bello, terrific) and Dad (Peter Macdissi, even better) are utterly removed from their daughter's reality. They haven't grown up as quickly as she has. They dismiss her or ignore her. And with no one to confide in, with every adult in her life, from school to family to neighbors, either heartlessly selfish or simply tactless, Jasira is jail-bait for some seemingly sympathetic male to come along and boost her self-esteem with a little underage sex.

Aaron Eckhart, back in touch with his dark side, is Mr. Vuoso, the racist Army Reservist next door. He ogles Jasira, gets her to babysit his bigoted son, who calls her "Towelhead" and worse. And when Vuoso catches her poring over his girlie magazines, he sees his chance.

At school, James, who is black, is the only boy to apologize for his racist teasing of the Middle Easterner. That apology becomes his pick-up line.

Dad's a narcissistic bully and a snob who, like her absent mom, blames Jasira "for everything." He is utterly unprepared for the biological challenges of raising a teenage girl and is hardly the guy to run to when Jasira's bad choices accelerate her dash to "bad girl."

Toni Collette shows up as that magical port in a storm, a very pregnant neighbor who picks up Jasira's hormonal distress signals, identifies the neighborhood creep, the self-centered and tuned-out dad and the boyfriend who has no business putting the moves on a 13-year-old, and throws Jasira a lifeline. Will she grab it?

Ball, who won an Oscar for writing the similarly themed American Beauty, sets several indiscretions in motion and ably guides us toward that moment when everything collides -- Jasira's dad's racism, his violent efforts to control his daughter, the daughter's inappropriate sexual behavior, the creepy neighbor's secret. But I can't say Ball wholly succeeds in walking that fine line between explanation/exploration and titillation. Towelhead's graphic sexuality teeters between clinically gynecological and child porn. And he doesn't give Bashil moments to show Jasira's learning curve, a sense that she's no longer being swept along by events but is taking control of them.

We've turned the phrase into a joke, but if there's one thing Towelhead reinforces more than any other message, it's that "it takes a village" to raise a child. And when that child is a teenager, it takes nosy, concerned neighbors and that reassuring threat, "I'm watching you," to save a kid from a culture so overripe with sex and sexual images that it's no wonder so many go so wrong, and that so many infantile, self-absorbed adults help them make that trip.